Every day down here was like a bad day back home. It got hot. It got sticky. And it never let up. U.S. soldiers gulped salt tablets. When the sweaty patches under their arms dried out-which didn't happen very often-they left salt stains on their uniforms. He itched constantly. Prickly heat, athlete's foot, jock itch…You name it, Armstrong came down with it. He smeared all kinds of smelly goop on himself. Sometimes it helped. More often, it didn't.
And there were bugs. They had mosquitoes down here that could have doubled as fighter-bombers. They had several flavors of ferocious flies. They had vicious little biting things the locals called no-see-'ems. They had chiggers. They had ticks. They had something called chinch bugs. The Army sprayed DDT on everything and everybody. It helped…some. You would have had to spray every square inch of the state to put down all the nasty biting things.
Local whites hated the men in green-gray who'd whipped their armies and made them stop killing Negroes. Bushwhackers shot at U.S. soldiers. You looked sideways at every junked motorcar by the side of the road. It could go boom and take half a squad with it.
The U.S. Army didn't waste time fighting fair, not after the surrender. Every time a U.S. soldier got shot, ten-then twenty-Confederates faced the firing squad. The number for an auto bomb started at a hundred and also quickly doubled.
Armstrong hadn't been on any firing squads while the war was going on. Now, with three stripes on his sleeve, he frequently commanded one. The first couple of times he did it, it made his stomach turn over. After that, it turned into routine, and he got used to it.
So did the soldiers who did the shooting. They went about their business at the same time as they argued about whether it did any good. "Just makes these motherfuckers hate us worse," Squidface opined.
"They already hate us," Armstrong said. "I don't give a shit about that. I just don't want 'em shooting at us."
"If we don't get the assholes who're really doin' it, what do we accomplish?" Squidface asked. "Shootin' little old ladies gets old, you know?"
"We shoot enough little old ladies, the ones who're left alive'll make the trigger-happy guys knock it off," Armstrong said.
"Good fuckin' luck." Squidface was not a believer.
Armstrong trotted out what he thought was the clincher: "'Sides, we kill all the whites down here, nobody'll be left to go bushwhacking, right?"
"Shit, now you're talkin' like a Confederate nigger," Squidface said. "We do that, won't be anybody left alive down here."
"Wouldn't break my heart." Armstrong wiped his face with his sleeve. The sleeve came away wet-big surprise. "Best thing they could do with this country is give it back to the possums and the gators."
Squidface laughed, but he wouldn't give up on the argument-what better way to kill time? He suggested a reason to leave some Confederates alive: "Nobody gets laid any more if we kill all the women. Some of the ones we grease are cute. That's a waste of good pussy."
"How come you haven't come down venereal yet?" Armstrong asked.
"Same reason you haven't, I bet," Squidface answered. "I'm lucky. And when I figure maybe I won't be lucky, I'm careful. The broads down here, they're nothin' but a bunch of whores."
"They lost," Armstrong said, which went a long way towards explaining things. He added, "A lot of 'em, their husbands or boyfriends aren't coming back, either."
He supposed he had been lucky. He'd got an education down here that was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than anything they'd tried to cram down his throat in high school. He hadn't cared about English lit or medieval history or practical math. This-this was stuff he wanted to learn.
The one thing he was glad about was that none of the women who'd enlightened him had come before his firing squad. That would have been worse than embarrassing, and it might have landed him in trouble. Orders against what the brass called fraternization had gone out. Getting anyone to listen to them was another story.
"Far as I'm concerned, it's the same now as it was when we were shooting at each other," he said. "I just want to serve out my hitch, take off the goddamn uniform, go back home, and figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life."
"Want to hear somethin' funny?" Squidface said.
"I'm all ears," Armstrong answered.
"Me, I'm thinkin' about turning into a lifer."
"Jesus Christ! C'mon with me, buddy. I'm taking you to the aid station. You're down with something worse than the clap. You've got softening of the brain, damned if you don't."
"Nah. I been thinkin' about it," Squidface said. "Thinkin' hard, too. Say I go back to Civvy Street. What's the best thing that can happen to me?"
"You get out of the Army," Armstrong answered at once.
"Yeah, and then what? Best thing I can see is, I spend the next forty years working in a factory, I find some broad, we have some kids and get old and fat together. Big fucking deal, pardon my French."
That was, in broad outline, the future Armstrong saw for himself, too. It didn't seem so bad-but, when Squidface laid it out, it didn't seem so good, either. But when the other choice was staying in…"Would you rather get your balls shot off instead? I already got one Purple Heart. That's about five too many."
"It won't be as bad now as it was," Squidface said. "What I figure is, if I stay in, I can end up a top kick pretty goddamn fast. They're gonna lose all kinds of senior noncoms-some of those sorry assholes are Great War retreads, and they ain't gonna stick around. People'll call me First Sergeant Giacopelli, not Squidface. I'll get to tell lieutenants where to head in. Even captains won't look at me like I'm dogshit on the bottom of their shoe. I'll have more fruit salad on my chest than the mess hall has in cans."
"You're gonna do what you're gonna do," Armstrong said. "Don't figure I can talk you out of it. Hell, I wish you luck, if it's what you really want. But I'm not gonna go that route."
"You'll end up in an office somewhere, with a secretary to blow you if your wife won't. You're a smart guy," Squidface said. "I'm just a sap from the wrong side of the tracks. Army's the first place I ever got anything like a square deal."
"If I'm so smart, what am I doing here?" Armstrong asked. Squidface laughed. Armstrong wished he hadn't made the crack about secretaries. His own father had worked in a Washington office since time out of mind. Armstrong didn't have any reason to think his old man was unfaithful, but now he'd wonder. That wasn't so good.
Then somebody let out a yell, and Armstrong and Squidface both jumped up to see what was going on. The guy who yelled was a captain. Seeing Armstrong, he said, "Gather up your platoon, Grimes, and take 'em into Hugo. We've got trouble there."
"Yes, sir," Armstrong said, and then, "Can you tell me what kind of trouble, so they know what to look out for?"
"There's a gal says a nigger raped her. He says she gave it up, and she only started yelling when somebody saw him leaving her house. All the white folks in town want to hang him up by the nuts. Before we got down here, they'd hang a coon for whistling at a white woman, let alone fucking her."
"What are we supposed to do, exactly?" Armstrong asked.
"He's in the town jail. Don't let 'em haul him out and lynch him. We're still figuring out what really happened-trying to, anyway. So that's what's going on. Go deal with it. Do whatever you have to do to hold the jail. White folks here have to know we're the law in these parts nowadays. They aren't. Got it?"
"Yes, sir," Armstrong replied-the only possible answer. Go deal with it, he thought. Right. Turning to Squidface, he said, "Let's round 'em up."